Even before it was fashionable, I was arguing that Mark Carney was aiming to take the Liberal Party in a sharp right-wing direction. When I said this during the Liberal Leadership contest in early 2025, many people scoffed and deemed it alarmist.  But time has proven me quite correct as Carney has moved his party towards Poilievre on everything from taxation to anti-labour policies to government cuts to backing Trump’s illegal war in Iran.

Still, many Liberal partisans moved the goalposts and argued that, of course, Mark Carney was an economic and foreign policy conservative, but what REALLY matters is that he’s keeping the social conservative crazies out: that by ‘strategically’ voting for his Liberal Party, you ensure that people like, oh say, Marilyn Gladu are never on the government side of Parliament. 

Oops!

It turns out that Carney welcomed Gladu to come and sit alongside the government in Parliament as part of the Liberal caucus. And it must be said that Gladu is no moderate on social issues. She has taken anti-abortion positions, she has spread misinformation about vaccine science, she was an explicit supporter of the destructive trucker convoy occupation of Ottawa, has expressed support for anti-gay and anti-trans conversion therapy, and critiqued the “transgender lifestyle.” It is reasonable to say that Gladu is more consistently and vocally right-wing than Pierre Poilievre himself, and she’s now been legitimized by the Carney Liberals.

Now, Carney has tried to assuage people that Gladu will not drag these hard-right positions into the operation of his government. But many Canadians are skeptical of that proclamation, namely because in the 2025 election when Poilievre made it clear he wasn’t going to push social conservative policies, Liberals said you shouldn’t believe him. Why? A big reason was that his caucus would contain hard-right members like Marilyn Gladu who would be pushing to make the issue a core one. 

The (anti-abortion) call is now coming from within the Liberal house. This is doubly so because an earlier Conservative floor crosser (Chris d’Entremont) is also listed as an anti-choice MP by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. One of the other crossers, Michael Ma, is listed as having no clear abortion position, which is concerning in and of itself. 

This gets to a broader misconception I’ve seen many people share — both Liberal supporters and detractors — that the LPC has no coherent ideology except winning and holding power. But this isn’t true: the Liberal Party will often reject clearly popular policies when they clash with the interest of the rich and powerful. They have and continue to reject a wealth tax even though it’s been a widely popular policy for years, which would win them votes, and help with the stated goal of consolidating power.  They likewise rejected the NDP’s dental care plan only until they were forced to implement it in a minority Parliament. So the Liberals DO have values, namely the empowerment of the capitalist class. All other things are up for negotiation and compromise. This is why the Liberals are rebuilding the anti-abortion wing of their party.

This whole sordid affair also exposes the failure of strategic voting under our First Past the Post (FPTP) system.  Remember that it’s been nearly 10 years since Justin Trudeau backed off his electoral reform promise. He said then that reform might have given someone like Keillie Leitch her own party: well now someone broadly similar to Leitch is on the LPC benches. The LPC held Canadians hostage in 2025, fearmongering of what a governing party with Gladu in its ranks would do, only to welcome her with a warm embrace less than a year later.

This is something people must remember when the next election rolls around: The Avi Lewis NDP is the only alternative to both Poilievre and the Gladu-Carney coalition. And even if one is a strategic voter, you can’t be ‘anything but conservative’ when the Liberals are conservatives.

Christo Aivalis is a political commentator and historian, holding a PhD in Canadian History from Queen’s University. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, The Breach, Canadian Dimension, Maclean’s, the Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post.